In the wake of President Obama’s declaration of martial law last week, just weeks before the 2012 general election, moderate Senate Republicans have proposed some alternatives to the President’s executive orders authorizing indefinite detention without trial and civil asset forfeiture.

The measures were described as “draconian” by former talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who has not been heard from in several days. Senate Republicans Olympia Snow, John McCain and minority leader Mitch McConnell came forward today with what they call “a reasonable alternative” to the emergency measures. They say they have met with Senators Harry Reid and Dick Durbin to negotiate the release on recognizance of several Republican senators, congressmen, and state governors, all of whom had been “very critical” of the emergency measures.

Senate Majority Leader McConnell spoke for the group:

“In this time of crisis, we must reach across the aisle to our colleagues and come to some sort of compromise on these executive orders. While we appreciate the urgency and severity of the situation that faces the President, we believe it is possible to deal with our unfortunate circumstances with a more moderate, measured approach.”

“We propose to allow those thousands of Americans being held incommunicado and without legal representation or charges being filed, to be released on their own recognizance from the detention camps around the country, after signing an agreement not to participate in political activity. They should be allowed to return to their homes, if they have not been demolished or re-assigned to needy immigrant families. They should wear a GPS-enabled house arrest ankle bracelet and keep authorities apprised of their whereabouts at all times.

“Of course, we would expect the President’s National Stability Police Force to continue to hold anyone who is a real security threat, but we expect that such detainees would be tried and convicted or released within a reasonable period.”

Saying they were trying to reach missing Congressional colleagues to get a consensus in support of the compromise, McConnell expects to be allowed to meet with the President’s chief of staff to present the proposal “within the next few weeks.”

{Note — like my “euthanasia letter” of a while back, I started this out as satire, but, as in that letter, the events described are not nearly as fanciful or funny as most of us wish they were. The best I can manage is a strong sense of irony. From irony to irons, you might say. — TC}

Our records indicate that you are sixty-five years of age as of your last birthday. The Office has made an examination your centralized medical and financial records, as authorized by Affordable Health Care Act regulations.

This examination indicates that you have a combination of seemingly minor medical conditions that, when looked at by a computerized statistical analysis, indicate that you may be subject to one or more serious, major health conditions. Treatment of these conditions would consume valuable health care resources that are already strained meeting the needs of your fellow Americans.

Your Social Security records indicate an extensive work history. Your credit history includes several stays at vacation and recreation sites. These observations lead the Office to find that you have lived a full and successful life, and we congratulate you on your many accomplishments.

It is the finding of this Department, with due regard for the value and potential costs of your life to the greater society, that no more than thirty days from the issuance date of this letter, you shall report to the nearest local clinic of the Office of Health Care Resource Conservation, for humane life termination.

Please bring positive identification, including a certified copy of your birth certificate, your Social Security card, and your federally-approved smart picture identification card. You should wear comfortable clothing, and leave all valuables, such as watch, wedding ring, cash and credit cards at home. If you use public transportation to get to your appointment at the clinic, your estate will be reimbursed for the expense

It is our duty to caution you against delaying your appearance at the center. Doing so will result in a warrant being issued for your arrest for contempt of government. As you may know, there is no trial afforded to anyone against whom such a warrant has been issued. All civil rights normally accorded to you by government are suspended at the time this warrant is issued, because as of the date and time of issue, you are legally deceased.

We are sure that you will make the responsible decision, and that none of the above measures will be required, saving government resources and protecting your friends and family from the personal and financial stresses of being arrested for harboring a legally-deceased federal fugitive.

Again, we thank you for your long, productive life, and we fully expect that you will cooperate in this process. Please rest assured that your remains will be disposed of in the clinic’s ultra-high-efficiency crematorium in an environmentally sound manner, with the least possible Carbon Dioxide emission.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Kathleen Sibelius

Secretary of Health and Human Services

[Note to readers — This letter hasn’t been written yet, but I expect that it will, if Obamacare doesn’t get the “mercy killing” it deserves. Thanks for reading — TC]

What if, what if, what if…? The recent discussion of the Egyptians’ reliance on the Internet for communication in their uprising, and of the “Internet Kill Switch” legislation in our own Congress, led me to thinking about preparedness in general, and emergency communication in particular.

The Internet has gone from an obscure fad to a virtual communication spinal cord in a couple of decades. It’s “the network of networks.” It’s “the cloud,” and the “information superhighway.” To some, it’s a free-flowing gutter; to others, it’s a lifeline to information, communication and entertainment they can’t imagine being without.

You are “plugged in,” to one degree or another, to that “cloud,” or you wouldn’t be reading this.

According to a TIME online story, what the Mubarak regime did was order the Internet Service Providers that serve Egypt to shut down their Domain Name Service (DNS servers). The article offers a capsule explanation of DNS:

When you open up your web browser and type a domain name into the address bar—say Time.com, for instance—your service provider sends a lightning-quick request to whichever service provider Time.com uses to make its web pages publicly available on the internet.

The computer that holds all of Time.com’s web pages sends a response back through its internet service provider basically saying, “Yes, we’re online. Here’s the web page you requested.”

That’s part of the story. The critical part of the DNS process is address translation. The Internet doesn’t know from www.yoursite.com. The DNS server converts the Universal Resource label (URL), the “human-friendly” name for the site you want to see, into an Internet Protocol (IP) address, which, for now, is a series of numbers and periods in the format ###.###.###. That is what really travels across town or around the world, to arrive at “www.yoursite.com.”

There’s a lesson, for you. If DNS service is down, you need a list of Internet Protocol addresses you can put into the address field of your browser to get to sites directly.

To get to my favorite Internet news site, World Net Daily, in the absence of DNS service, I simply put “70.85.95.100”(without the quotation marks) into my address field, and go there.

How did I find that out? I opened a command line window (I speak Windows; sorry, Apple and Linux speakers – you’re on your own) and ran the PING command using several of my most frequent browsing destinations.

Here’s an example of the PING command and its output, from my IP address gathering process:

The important information here isn’t the lousy ping times I get from my ISP, but the fact that when I enter the domain name — drudgereport.com in this case – (note the omission of “www” and the like), PING gives me the IP address, (209.234.251.93) it got from the DNS server I am currently connected to, which it uses to find the right server at the other end and measure the time required to get an acknowledgment.

Obviously, taking down the DNS service will impede access for those who don’t know how to get around it, but just as obviously, that is a porous barrier to the Internet. Not only can people who have stored their most-used IP addresses locally get through, but satellite-based ISPs, as well as any ISP who can be reached by dial-up, even in another hemisphere, can provide access, however slow and filtered that access may be. Any regime or force that wants to cut off Internet service completely, or at least much more completely than the Egyptian government did, has to take down wireline phone service, as well as cellular service, and jam satellite downlink frequencies.

The Internet is designed with “robustness” in mind, with multiple paths among connected nodes, and that makes an “Internet Kill Switch”more of a challenge than it may appear to be from a user’s perspective. (Thanks to Bruce Schneier, long-time Internet security and encryption expert)

If it were possible to take down the Internet in a given region, the results may be a classic, “be careful what you wish for” scenario. Governments that want to clamp down on the Internet may discover too late how dependent their own activities are on it. Will they be able to use government debit cards to refuel military vehicles? Will their air traffic control system’s communication network collapse? How about the electrical grid, public transportation, metropolitan traffic control systems, for starters – will a government that wants to enhance its grip on its population deliberately blind and deafen itself, just to silence social networks and news outlets?

Government suppression of the Internet may be the least of our concerns, in fact. We don’t even need our government to put the Internet at risk. Two other “actors” may be a lot more likely to succeed where governments fail: terrorists, and the sun.

All it will take is a little, tiny episode of solar flatulence, known scientifically as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The sun, notorious for its stubborn inclination to ignore and flaunt government regulations and environmentalist lobbying, is about due for another of its periodic episodes of instability. This instability includes a tendency to fling huge clouds of high-energy particles out from its nearly-endless supply of such materials.

Should our planet happen to be in the way of one of these clouds, the results will be spectacular and calamitous, but not unprecedented. As it passes through the cloud, the energy in the cloud will induce electric currents in any conductor, such as a power line or radio antenna, and the currents induced may be much greater than the conductor, and any connected equipment, can tolerate.

The earth itself will rattle with the shock of this blast of energy. A geomagnetic storm is a secondary effect of the CME. The earth’s magnetic field will ring like a bell, with effects on life and technology both known and unknown.

This impact would not be an overnight phenomenon, but could bathe the earth in strong energy clouds for weeks or months. The associated Auroradisplays might be spectacularly beautiful, but most of us will be too busy trying to survive the other effects to have much time top enjoy the show.

Ole’ Mom Nature and government shutdowns are not the only way uncontrollable forces can have a huge impact on the Internet and the rest of the infrastructure. A small, but well-funded group of terrorists, or “axis of evil” agents, armed with a small nuclear weapon and a “SCUD” class, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) can blind and cripple us, too.

SCUD on semi-trailer launcher, courtesy Wklipedia

A nondescript container ship could pull up off the Atlantic coast a hundred miles out from Washington DC, and launch a missile sold or donated by Russia, North Korea, Iran, or a non-state entity with lots of money. If the missile has a warhead consisting of, say, a refurbished Russian tactical nuclear warhead, furnished by the same thoughtful donor or another, or sold by some organized crime venture, the goal would be to detonate the missile not on or near the ground, as in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, but a hundred miles or so above Washington, or nearby.

The nuclear detonation, even resulting from a very small, “suitcase”-style weapon, would have the expected blast effects from heat and sudden pressure – although they would be diminished on the ground due to the high altitude of the detonation — but it would also create a huge, sharp electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Before discounting the possibly existence of nuclear warheads small enough to launch above a SCUD-sized IRBM, recall that both the Russians and Americans developed and built thousands of nuclear artillery shells, one of which was successfully test-fired and detonated.

The upper atmosphere would interact with the pulse to create a huge, secondary pulse that would spread over an area of hundreds, or thousands, of square miles. There would be instant and dramatic effects on anything electrical for hundreds or thousands of miles in any direction. The impulse would be far stronger than a CME-induced surge, but lasting only a fraction of a second. The effect, though, would last for months, or years, in terms of its effect on the nation.

The effect on a society as dependent on electricity and electronics as ours, would be devastating, and that is not just the apocalyptic fantasy of a few catastrophe freaks and post-apocalypse survival enthusiasts. Credible groups have testified before Congress on the potential effects of such an attack, but with little apparent impact on our national priorities.

Nightmarish scenarios exist, such as a novel by a historian named William Forstchen, One Second After.

There is considerable disagreement as to the scientific and technical accuracy of the novel’s predictions, as one can see in the extended discussion of the book on Amazon, but not much disagreement that the effects will be severe and long-lasting. As long as the Internet stays up, you can learn more about EMP in its various forms at EMPact America, http://www.empactamerica.org/

Whether the cause of the outage is government action, terrorism or solar storms, doing without the Internet is

What’s a communication-dependent technophile to do? Do you carry a spare tire in your car? Why? The odds of a flat in the middle of nowhere are low, but the repercussions are severe – what disaster prep strategists refer to as a “low probability, high consequences event.”

You can only shoot so many people in the head in the basement of the Lubjanka Prison at a time, and the logistics of ammunition, shooters and body disposal impose an upper limit on the rate at which that can happen.

Suppose, however, that you find the entire population of a region to be inconvenient. You already have absolute power over the means of production, transportation and communication, because you are the head of a communist state, and that is what communism means.

Suppose that region is the Ukraine, one of the most fertile regions on earth. There are about 13 million people there who are distressingly unwilling to serve the state as they should. They deserve a bullet in the head, but the numbers are daunting.

You are saving up bullets to use on the German fascists, whose brand of socialism is competing with yours to enslave Europe, and getting more powerful by the day. “Cutthroat competition” may be a cliché among the capitalists, but to socialists, it is a literal way of doing business.

In this competitive environment, getting 13 million Ukrainians to stand up next to a ditch so you can shoot them is unlikely, and the logistical limitations frustrate the sensibilities of an absolute dictator.

The owners of the mega-farms of the Tsarist era have all been killed off by Lenin at the beginning of the 1917 revolution, but the vacuum has been filled by millions of peasant farmers, in Ukraine and other Soviet slave states, whose success at food production has made them distressingly independent of the Soviet state. Stalin sees them as the vanguard of a Ukrainian nationalist independence movement, and thus intolerable.

Food is power, and Stalin knows it.

He confiscates the stored grain that was both a form of currency, and the seed for next year’s crop, reducing the peasant farmers from self-sufficient producers to slaves, a status more consistent with the role he wants for them in his socialist utopia.

He sells a lot of the grain on international markets, making the communists seem productive, to the inattentive world, although the result will be starvation.

He introduces “internal passports” to discourage migration from the areas he has stripped of the capacity to produce food, effectively isolating them from the rest of the world, and, as the judges did for Terri Schiavo, “let nature take its course.”

While the New York Times expressed its admiration for the Soviet dictator in an endless series of articles by self-appointed Stalin PR flack Walter Duranty,the real consequence of “Uncle Joe’s” dabblings in the grain market is mass starvation.

While they hated his competing brand of socialism, the Nazis must have been impressed with his ruthlessness and expedience in disposing of inconvenient masses of people.

Sure, in the same way Obamacare was about “reforming” our health care system, and “Cap and Trade” is about “protecting” our environment. What could go wrong with giving federal bureaucrats control over our health care, and over our energy supplies?

Throw in federal control over our food supply, and you have either a safer, more stable America, or you have the three sides of an iron triangle in which to make Americans prisoners in their own homes. I suspect the latter.

I sent the following letter to my US Senator, Nominal Republican Lamar Alexander, who is a co-sponsor of this power grab.

S.510 is a huge extension of federal authority into food production, with a great deal of discretion left to the “Secretary” (of HHS) as to its scope.

I cannot find anywhere an explicit exemption of coverage for individuals or families who want to grow or produce their own food, but a great deal of costly bureaucracy imposed at all levels of food production.

Like the indignities to which air travelers are now subjected, this will be expensive and of little use to advance its stated goals.

The Congressional Research Service summary of S510 includes the following language:

“…require that each person (excluding farms and restaurants) who manufactures, processes, packs, distributes, receives, holds, or imports an article of food permit inspection of his or her records if the Secretary believes that there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to such food will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

This would appear to require extensive record-keeping by me, if I want to grow vegetables in a garden. “If the Secretary believes” I have to show this paperwork to federal bureaucrat inspectors, I have to, and for no other reason than it is what the “Secretary believes.” Criminal penalties may apply, if the Secretary wants them.

Furthermore, nowhere in the summary do I find what effect on the cost of producing food at any level, from the home garden to the corporate farm, this law will have.

As a cosponsor of this legislation, it is your responsibility to justify the legitimacy of this bill under the Constitution, and to account for the costs and benefits of this bill to the consumer.

I believe you cannot justify the constitutionality of this legislation, or its costs.

Leaving so much discretion to an unelected bureaucrat (how many times do phrases like, “at the Secretary’s discretion,” “if the Secretary determines,” “allows the Secretary to promulgate…” appear in this bill?) only reminds us of the enormous abuses heaped upon us in Obamacare.

I have had enough of this kind of intrusion on our rights under the guise of protecting us. You should be embarrassed to be associated with such a blatant power grab.

Please uphold your commitment to the Constitution by withdrawing your support from S.510 and working to defeat it.

Respectfully,
Thomas D. Cox

I guess if you can subject American air travelers to invasive x-rays or plastic-gloved groping as if they were presumptive criminals en route from their cells to the exercise yard, you can expect them to surrender their health care, their energy sources and now – their food supply — to federal government control.

Just hope and pray you don’t fall into what the government sees as a ‘politically inconvenient” group.

As a retired information technology worker, I find it convenient to organize some kinds of information into rows and columns, like a spreadsheet. It helps me get my mind around a complex topic.

While examining one such topic, environmentalism, I discovered that environmentalists can be divided into three general categories (spreadsheet columns): Pragmatists, Primitivists, and Watermelons. The three types address two, exemplary environmental problems – global warming and ozone depletion (spreadsheet rows) — and their solutions, very differently.

Theodore Roosevelt, a pragmatists who became an obnoxious Progressive (Wikipedia)

Pragmatists tend to follow the example of Teddy Roosevelt, an asthmatic city boy who developed a passion for understanding nature through science and personal experience. While developing enough respect for natural wonders to create the country’s first national parks, he saw man as the dominant species, and nature as his domain, to be exploited responsibly, but not to be destroyed needlessly.

Pragmatists seek to strike a balance between human needs and natural beauty, believing that, with recourse to accurate, scientific data, humanity can benefit from nature without destroying it, and vice versa.

TR, unfortunately, set a strong precedent for government expropriating land for “public” use that was for esthetic reasons, rather than for meeting the nations practical needs — construction of fortresses, bridges, and other necessary evils. He did stop well short of turning the nation’s largest and most easily exploited sources of energy into untouchable preserves, however, leaving those morally-indefensible acts of government grand theft to later Progressives.

Pragmatists want to see objective evidence of global warming and ozone depletion, and to identify the most likely causes of these phenomena, before they entertain government policies meant to remedy them. Pragmatists become excited in the short term by the environment, if they find themselves at the foot of an erupting volcano, or in the path of a tornado, but otherwise, they tend to be focused calmly on the long term.

The romanticized “Indian,” emblem of the Primitivist ideal — the Unicorn, mascot of idealist nature-worshipers everywhere, was not available. (Wikipedia)

Primitivists have no use for science, other than political science, and its ugly, bastard son, junk science. Their ideal world is one from which humans and their civilization have been erased, or, better yet, one in which they never existed at all. If asked, they will admit to a desire to see about 99% of the world’s human population disappear, except for themselves and a few close friends with a similar orientation.

The most extreme Primitivists believe that human life is no more valuable than the life of an insect or a plant, and that the idea of exploiting an animal or a plant to extend or improve the life of a human is immoral and selfish. In their more tempered state, primitivists envision a romantically idealized harmony in the relationship of man and nature.

Their emblem of this ideal is the romanticized American Indian (whom they, of course, call a “Native American,” as if that phrase did not mean, literally, “one who was born in America”). This mythical character lives frugally and gently with the land, worshiping it as a god, seeing spirituality in every tree and rock. One assumes these characters would not build casinos and duty-free liquor stores in their pristine estates, or profit from the sale of mineral rights therefrom.

Primitivists accept global warming and ozone depletion without question, because these phenomena only serve to confirm their belief that man is a burden on nature, and that he will destroy it if allowed. Their remedy is simple and straightforward. Abort the unborn ones, and let the born ones freeze, bake and starve to death, and return their biodegradable packaging to the environment.

Green on the outside, but RED on the inside (Wikipedia)

Watermelons are pragmatic, too, in their own way. Having been exposed as hypocrites or fools, these believers in a bankrupt, failed ideology that calls for government ownership of everything, had to find another rock under which to hide. Environmentalism is the perfect refuge for communists, because it allows those who are red on the inside to put a layer of green on the outside, and continue to spread their toxic theology. In the 21st Century, environmentalism is the last bastion of people who think private property is The Man’s way of oppressing the downtrodden.

In the Watermelon’s view, people are not entirely evil. A certain number of them are required to drive the party elite in their limousines from the halls of power to their dachas in the woods, to cook their gourmet meals, and to fight and die in the interest of preserving and expanding their empires.

However, the history of socialism in the 20th Century includes a laudable amount of population control in the form of purges. The big-name socialist utopias lightened Mother Earth’s burden of humanity by a hundred million or so, in the interest of the state. While an unfortunate quantity of lead and carbon dioxide had to be introduced to the environment by firing squads, cattle trains and tanks, most of these deaths were accomplished with lower environmental impact — mass starvation and death by slave labor, predominating.

In the 21st Century, Communist China has recently taken the lead in recycling. Environmentally responsible Chinese leaders now harvest the skin, corneas and internal organs of the political prisoners they execute, and sell them on the open market. While this practice carries the unsavory taint of capitalism, watermelons believe any country that not only allows abortion, but requires it, must have its heart in the right place.

Watermelons readily embrace global warming and ozone depletion as crises, because the “solutions” for them involve government regulation of private industry. While not entirely satisfactory, government regulation of industry is a step in the right direction — toward the Watermelons’ ultimate goal: government ownership of industry.

Watermelons believe the best way to relieve human overcrowding (between purges) is to build large, ugly, concrete apartment blocks in major cities. Then, they force people selfish enough to live in their own homes to surrender these anachronisms to the state and move into the apartments. Problem solved.

Appalling tales of the worst environmental disasters on earth – horrible nuclear accidents and wholesale contamination of large areas with industrial poisons, perpetrated by communist states – do nothing to curb the Watermelons’ appetite for government control. After all, environmentalism is just a convenient form of cover for a Watermelon, not a real ideology.

The real goal of the Watermelon is, and always has been, government control of every aspect of life, from before birth, up to and including death. Individual humans are just too stupid to be trusted with running their own lives, and if they have to be sold on communism by bait-and-switch, well, so be it.

There you have it. I promised a spreadsheet, with rows and columns. Here it is:

Pragmatists

Primitivists

Watermelons

Global Warming

Identify real problems; Propose real solutions.

Let people freeze to death in the dark.

Abort or purge most people; forcibly relocate the rest and run their lives. Dominate the world.